Abortion supporters often work very hard to hide their hardline approach to abortion. They recoil when you talk about their demand that any baby be killed if the mother decides she doesn't want to be pregnant. They'll argue that the baby is "only a clump of cells" or that "most of those abortions are done for fetal abnormalities" or some such argument. They won't back down, mind you. But they will try very hard to explain away any opposition to killing children as a sort of necessity.
Then there's the open hardliners. These people don't really care about the reasons for abortion; they think any reason or no reason is good enough to snuff out inconvenient life. That pregnancy is a temporary condition and death is forever (at least in this life) doesn't deter their thinking. Go to any feminist website and you'll see plenty of examples of posters and commenters freely admitting that killing one's offspring is a fundamental right of being a woman.
NARAL and NOW aren't quite as open about their adoration of the culture of death, but they have found their candidate of choice: Barack Obama. Over the last year, I've had more than a couple of skirmishes with pro-abortion types who want to argue why Obama isn't the extremist he appears. They buy into the big lie that Obama would have supported federal legislation mandating that doctors not ignore infants born after failed abortions. They swallow whole the mendacity of Obama's record with the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act. They'll even go so far as to attack anyone who calls Obama on his approach.
But sometimes, Obama's own behavior speaks for itself. How would Obama handle abortion? Take a look.
For starters, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest. The abortion industry laments that this longstanding federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, ''forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead.'' In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.
But this barely scratches the surface of Obama's extremism. He has promised that ''the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act'' (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed ''fundamental right'' to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed Act, ''a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined 'health' reasons.'' In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would ''sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.''
YOu get that? These are people who aren't interested in reducing the number of abortions. That's the big lie. They want to ensure that there's never an abortion desired that doesn't get completed. And those pissant voters? Screw 'em!
But it gets even worse. Senator Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies.
Why not help women facing crisis pregnancies if you really don't think abortion is the be all and end all? Because the fact is, Obama is concerned that any abortion would be unobtainable, no matter how late in the pregnancy it is or how ridiculous the excuse is.
And Obama's contempt for life doesn't stop with abortion. As this article points out, Obama supports the mass production of human embryos for stem cell research, even though there are plenty of ways to get stem cells these days without killing embryos. I disagree with ESCR at all as gruesome, barbaric and evil, but the idea of farming humans when we can get the material from other sources stretches even my idea of evil.
This author compares the pro-choice/abortion side to pro-slavery arguments and it is powerful.
The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people - Thomas Jefferson was one - reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn't think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.
Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as ''pro-choice''? Of course we would not. It wouldn't matter to us that they were ''personally opposed'' to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were ''unnecessary,'' or that they wouldn't dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said ''Against slavery? Don't own one.'' We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.
These days, we're told that in order to reduce the number of abortions, we have to make it easier to get. This illogic is as stunning as it is mendacious. These extremists don't believe parents should be involved in the decisions of their children. They don't think there is ever a time when the baby's right to life outweighs the mother's convenience (even Roe didn't make that argument). These people don't acknowledge a right of conscience for doctors, nurses, or pharmacists who might not want to be accomplices in these "choices."
Why?
Because any loophole that allows someone not to be involved in abortion is one more loophole that prevents some woman somewhere of getting that abortion she wants. So, these people don't acknowledge that a person could go into women's health medicine with the idea of helping, not hurting, humans. Or that taxpayers could think it was not a good use of their money to fund unnecessary abortions.
That's your President Obama, the side they try very hard to hide or explain away.
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